Vertex 3 is way to slow!

A few days ago I received my new MBP 15", 2.2ghz quad with the standard Apple SSD equiped. Today my Vertex 3 240 GB arrived. I was really looking forward to the final speedbump, installed it and - felt no difference at all? Okay, let's run some benchmarks with xbench. Here are the results:

Okay, I'll give it a go. Format with the diskutility will be fine? I honestly don't like taken the book apart the third time only for formatting the disk. It's a shame it's not possible to boot from a livecd and update the FW, erase the drive etc.

Not defective. I get similar numbers. Do keep in mind that all SSDs advertise their speeds as "up to XXXMB/sec", not "always running at XXXMB/sec". It may not show up in this benchmark, but the drive is plenty capable.

Interesting, thanks for your replies. I just can't feel any difference between the stock-ssd and the vertex 3. At least during the benchmarks it should it somwhere in the region the manufacturer posts i thought. During normal use there is absolutely no speedbump.. starting eclipse takes the exact same 5 seconds as it does with the toshiba drive. I try to get the benchmarks from xbench i did with that drive.. I think they showed something around ~350.

Interesting, thanks for your replies. I just can't feel any difference between the stock-ssd and the vertex 3. At least during the benchmarks it should it somwhere in the region the manufacturer posts i thought. During normal use there is absolutely no speedbump.. starting eclipse takes the exact same 5 seconds as it does with the toshiba drive. I try to get the benchmarks from xbench i did with that drive.. I think they showed something around ~350.

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I doubt anyone really can tell, that's what benchmarks are for. You really have to push the drive with heavy server I/O-type actions in order to separate SSDs in the real world based on performance.

The great leap from HDD to SSD comes from taking a 4.37ms latency on the fastest HDD (WD Raptor drive @ 10k RPM) and just destroying it with your average SSDs latency of 0.1ms (a 43x improvement) on every single file request. But since latency hasn't improved that much, going from one SSD to another isn't that impressive. Higher bandwidth IS needed if you wanted to dump RAW un-encoded 1080p data from a RED camera pushing hundreds of megabutes of writes per second, but not many people are in that position.

My new Vertex 3 which was delivered with firmware 2.06 is working perfectly. Cloned it via Carbon Cloner and put it in. My speeds are about 500MB/s read and write. I hope it stays that way.
My advice is, try another speed test tool like AJA System Test and see if you get other results. On xBench I'm getting similar results as you do...

Interesting, thanks for your replies. I just can't feel any difference between the stock-ssd and the vertex 3. At least during the benchmarks it should it somwhere in the region the manufacturer posts i thought. During normal use there is absolutely no speedbump.. starting eclipse takes the exact same 5 seconds as it does with the toshiba drive. I try to get the benchmarks from xbench i did with that drive.. I think they showed something around ~350.

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The latency is pretty much the same between the stock SSD and the Vertex 3, you won’t see any major performance gains in your daily usage and you won’t feel it unless you pay extra super attention to what you’re doing. The only speed benefit you’ll see is when you’re transferring huge files over a long period of time on the same drive or to another SSD on the same machine.

Xbench is not the best app to test your speed, it is fairly old and inaccurate with the latest SSDs. Even so, your benchmarks looks to be right for that SSD.

The 500Mbps read/write speed isn’t entirely accurate, it is only for transferring files sequentially and on the same drive. The random performance is much lower than that, ~200-300MBps and even lower for write.

The latency is pretty much the same between the stock SSD and the Vertex 3, you wont see any major performance gains in your daily usage and you wont feel it unless you pay extra super attention to what youre doing. The only speed benefit youll see is when youre transferring huge files over a long period of time on the same drive or to another SSD on the same machine.

Xbench is not the best app to test your speed, it is fairly old and inaccurate with the latest SSDs. Even so, your benchmarks looks to be right for that SSD.

The 500Mbps read/write speed isnt entirely accurate, it is only for transferring files sequentially and on the same drive. The random performance is much lower than that, ~200-300MBps and even lower for write.

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I wanted to upgrade my Vertex2 on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13" to a Vertex3 because the specs (read/write) of the SataIII Vertex3 SSD's seem so impressive, yet I get the feeling that I wouldn't see much of a difference in general real world performance?

I wanted to upgrade my Vertex2 on my 2011 Macbook Pro 13" to a Vertex3 because the specs (read/write) of the SataIII Vertex3 SSD's seem so impressive, yet I get the feeling that I wouldn't see much of a difference in general real world performance?

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You won’t. Is there anything you’re doing that requires that much speed? Majority of people won’t notice a difference between Vertex 1 and Vertex 3 because they don’t anything to take advantage of the speed. The app’s launch speed is determined by the latency first, not entirely by the actual sequential read/write speed.

You wont. Is there anything youre doing that requires that much speed? Majority of people wont notice a difference between Vertex 1 and Vertex 3 because they dont anything to take advantage of the speed. The apps launch speed is determined by the latency first, not entirely by the actual sequential read/write speed.

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You can see some speed differences from a Sata-I bus 2008 Macbook 4.1 and regular Hard Drive (first column) , to a Vertex2 SSD in the second column.

Than in the last column you can see the speed difference going to a 2011 Macbook Pro 13" with a Sata-III bus with a Vertex2 SSD and 8 gig of ram.

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